i.m. AMSTRAD

Dear Lord Sugar, it’s been a sad week. A kind of bereavement, really. Today, a council employee in a yellow jacket climbed down from his municipal truck and flung into it my old friend of — what? — twenty years?

We never needed passwords between us. It never told me bad news about my server or jumped off the edge of the screen or tried to sell me corduroy trousers or ham or celebrity gossip. It was like a butler: discreet, self-effacing.

But at last it began to suffer touches of dementia. Sometimes, I told the council man, things have to die quietly and be eviscerated for the common good. He nodded deferentially, but raced off in an eye-watering flourish of exhaust.